Challenge

A large communications service provider, serving primarily Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets, was dissatisfied with its service delivery performance and wanted to know what it could do to improve customer signups and retention.  The company had a competitive service package and was positioned in markets where its value proposition would pose a significant challenge to other service providers. It was well focused on the business sector with a strong understanding of what customers wanted from a service provider. Yet the company was not hitting its performance targets with regard to operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and financial growth.

Some of the shortcomings were obvious to management. For example:

• The installation interval for new customer turn-ups was too long;
• There were deficiencies in billing accuracy and timeliness of billing;
• Up-selling of customers to new packages was not progressing as expected;
• Cash flow was not where it should be in respect to projected costs and revenues;
• Trouble ticket resolution was taking too long in many instances.

To senior executives, the solutions to these and other problems seemed to require implementation of new processes and systems, and so they turned to TMNG Global for management consulting and advice on what those solutions should be. But TMNG Global’s team made clear that any thorough analysis of what needed to be done would have to take into account all aspects of the service delivery process, including management and organization as well as systems and operations.  Thus, the CLEC’s directors agreed to give us a mandate to get to the heart of the problems, no matter where the effort might lead.

With our long experience in providing professional services that deal with such situations,  we understand that it’s always easier for companies to embrace a need for systems upgrades than it is to look at the organizational and operations issues that might be causing problems. By applying well-honed analytic and research processes we knew we would be able to identify and prioritize solutions based on which steps would produce the greatest results in the shortest amount of time. Not surprisingly, following an intensive three-month review and analysis, we determined that systems issues and solutions were well down the priority list of things that could be done to significantly improve the company’s performance.

TMNG Global Solution

The customer asked our team to look into the effects on service delivery performance from four perspectives: executive; organizational; process, and operations.

The team’s approach relied heavily on interviews with personnel at all levels in all these categories. The team performed detailed “walk-throughs” of all line functions and thoroughly reviewed all relevant reports, processes and procedures.

At the same time, we relied on our professional experience to arrive at preliminary assessments of the company’s processes and structure, basing these in part on its ability to benchmark company performance against industry averages in certain key areas. A major benefit of the expertise we bring to bear in analyzing a service provider’s performance in service delivery or other areas of operation is an extensive data base of industry performance averages against which an individual company’s performance can be compared. This data covers a vast range of operations categories that help isolate areas of under-performance.

For example, a company’s order completeness – the ratio of total orders received to orders rejected – can be benchmarked against the industry average in our data base.  Similarly, a company’s performance respecting timeliness of order fulfillment, order accuracy and even timeliness of script changes measuring how quickly a company adjusts its order processes to meet new product and marketing requirements, can be tabulated and measured against industry benchmarks. If these detailed comparisons at highly granular levels of operational detail show clear patterns of deficiency against industry performance, the client company will have greater confidence in the findings and recommendations of an outside party.

Similarly, the personnel interview process is an area where long experience and understanding of the industry is vital to success in any assessment of what needs to be done to improve a company’s performance. Our approach is to impress on company personnel that the interviews aren’t meant to assess blame for failures but rather to help formulate changes that will improve their individual performance and that of the company as a whole.

The team, along with soliciting information on the workflow and managerial environment, explores what remedial measures have been applied in the past and floats ideas to determine the level of personnel receptivity to various types of solutions. By gaining insight not only into how each individual perceives the operation but also into how members of the organization react to new ideas, we are better able to shape their recommendations to address the overall “personality” of the organization as well as the structural and operational details.

Once the team completed its review and assessment, we were able to prioritize recommended actions in each area of concern based on the team’s collective judgment as to which would remedies have the most immediate and biggest impact on performance. And we were able to suggest  the likely cost impact with regard to each recommendation.

Not surprisingly, the “lowest hanging fruit” with respect to what actions would produce the greatest effect at the customer level were to be found in managerial aspects of the organization. Personnel were spending 25 percent of their time compiling and reporting on individual performance metrics, leaving them less time than needed for the tasks directly relating to service delivery performance.

Worse, the segmentation of accountability around individual work responsibilities was causing people to focus more on who to blame for things not getting done, than on making sure the job was completed. A vertical structuring of lines of command and responsibilities worked against the need to manage horizontally across all lines to ensure proper coordination of responsibilities and effective execution in customer management, from order taking through to fulfillment, up-selling and troubleshooting. Lack of management follow-through and accountability combined with poor communications to create a corporate culture that worked against the need for good teamwork.

Product implementation also suffered from organizational weaknesses. Products were released without an implementation plan. Product packaging, business rules or pricing changes were made without assessing the impact on the organization’s ability to effectively support the changes.

The TMNG Global team found that the remedies to every one of the specific deficiencies in management and organization would have a very high customer and revenue impact and could be executed in the near term at minimal costs. In contrast, ratings of remedies affecting systems and processes ranged from very high impact to medium with typically higher costs and longer implementation timeframes than was the case for the managerial and organizational solutions. Problems with order management processes, order entry, service activation, responsiveness to customer calls and other functions were significant, but it was clear the company had an opportunity to act quickly at the top to effect major changes in service delivery performance even before the systems changes were implemented.

Benefits to the Client

The company acted quickly on many of our recommendations. Changes were made in management personnel; lines of command were adjusted, and a work-group approach to performing specific tasks replaced the “everyone-for-himself” approach that prevailed before. On the processes side, one of the easiest-to-implement recommendations involved prioritization of orders on the basis of size of orders and the importance of the customer, in contrast to an approach that put orders into service categories and then treated them equally within those categories on a first-come, first-served basis.

Since we have completed our consulting services, the customer has grown and prospered. And in a subsequent merger with other service providers, its revised organizational structure, managerial procedures and customer service processes were used as a template on which the newly formed company’s operations were modeled. By acting aggressively on the recommendations that we put together over the course of a three-month engagement, the company’s directors not only brought the company in line with performance expectations, they set a standard for operational excellence that won the respect of their new peers.